In the business of an electrician, particularly as applied to the service and maintenance work in large industrial or institutional establishments, there is frequently the need for supplying wire in large amounts of varying sizes. Wire used in the electrician's trade is supplied on spools of various sizes. Some spools are quite large and can be very heavy when full. Moving such heavy weights is a common source of injury. Other spools are considerably smaller, and may be six inches or less in diameter. Where several sizes of wire are to be used the work of handling several reels often becomes extremely burdensome even for several workmen.
At the present time, cables of various sorts are used to connect the many pieces of digital and/or communications equipment that may be used in offices, control rooms and the like. Accordingly, construction electricians must typically have at hand many different types of electrical cables for completing a construction project. These types of cables may differ in many aspects. For example, different wire gauges are typically employed throughout a building. In large commercial, institutional, and industrial projects served by multiphase electrical supply systems, the various phases and neutral conductors are usually distinguished by color coding of the insulating jacket. Some applications require stranded conductors, while others require solid, single filament conductors. Therefore, a wide variety of electrical cables area typically required in each construction project.
When the equipment is installed, or if it is reconfigured later, it is necessary to run hundreds, even thousands, of feet of such cable. The cable is typically provided on spools and is unwound, or dispensed, from these spools as needed. Because of the weight and bulk of the cable, most conventional cable-pulling operations use 1000-foot spools, which weigh approximately 30 pounds each. Because normal cable usage typically results in a scrap of cable at the end of the spool that is too short to use cost-effectively, these scraps are considered waste. Research has revealed the length of the average scrap to be approximately 100 feet, or ten percent of a 1000 foot spool. The scrap length is independent of the volume of cable originally on the spool, so the use of larger capacity spools would result in a correspondingly lower percentage of scrapped cable. It is therefore desired to provide a means for dispensing cable that allows use of larger capacity spools.
It is preferred to work with spools of significant length of cable to avoid frequent depletion of a spool. Illustratively, many electricians prefer to work with spools containing 2,500 feet of cable. As wire gauge increases, the various spools become correspondingly heavy. It would be impractical to carry individual spools of wire from place to place within a construction site.
Safely transporting a large spool about a work site and unreeling wire from the spool are difficult without a suitable cart or hand truck and a rack to support the spool. An electrician may also need several smaller spools at hand while working with a large spool. While the inventor is aware of carts and hand trucks suitable for small spools, there is a need for a means which can lift, support and transport a large main spool, along with several small auxiliary spools, and which can also serve as a support rack while wire is unreeled from the spools.
Many currently available devices for supporting cable spools during usage do not typically provide for the simultaneous dispensing of cable from multiple spools; therefore, make-shift cable dispensing devices are sometimes jerryrigged and may even include one or more lengths of pipe inserted through the rungs of a step ladder to form a crude axle for each spool. More commonly, the spools supplying the cable are positioned at the installation site on their ends so that they do not roll as the cable is unwound. The cable installer has to make sure that the cables do not become tangled or kinked as they unwind.
Therefore, there is a need for a cart for supporting, transporting, dispensing and storing a plurality of wire supporting reels and which includes a guide which efficiently guides the wire as it is being dispensed.
Still further, when a cart such as discussed above is loaded with several spools of wire it is imperative that the cart be stable. This is especially so if the cart is used on a construction site and is moved from place to place over terrain that may be uneven. In addition to the stability of such a cart being adversely affected by uneven terrain, if some of the wire spools are full while others are nearly empty or some of the wire spools are heavy while others are lighter, the stability of the cart may be adversely affected. If the cart is not extremely stable, it may tip over during transit from one place to another, or even during use. Such a situation is undesirable.
Therefore, there is a need for a cart for supporting, transporting, dispensing and storing a plurality of wire supporting reels and which is stable during use.